PUBLIC MARKS from jeanruaud with tag people

2011

Twitter is an online social networking tool in which users post 140 character updates of what is going on in their lives along with links to things they think are interesting, funny, or useful to their followers (“following” being essentially what “friending” is on other sites). People use twitter in many ways, some as a newsfeed by following prominent people or networks, some as a pseudo-chatroom by limiting their followers and whom they follow to close friends and family, and some as a microblog for updating people about the work they are doing and their personal lives.

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.
Indeed, no matter what Facebook allows us to do, I have found that most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships, online and off — what has become known as Dunbar’s number. Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life — a fact incorporated into the new social networking site Path, which limits the number of friends you can have to 50.
What’s more, contrary to all the hype and hope, the people in our electronic social worlds are, for most of us, the same people in our offline social worlds. In fact, the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 to 130, just short enough of Dunbar’s number to allow room for grandparents and babies, people too old or too young to have acquired the digital habit.

When the future novelist David Foster Wallace was about 14 years old, he asked his father, the University of Illinois philosophy professor James D. Wallace, to explain to him what philosophy is, so that when people would ask him exactly what it was that his father did, he could give them an answer. James had the two of them read Plato's Phaedo dialogue together, an experience that turned out to be pivotal in his understanding of his son. "I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly or who responded with such maturity and sophistication," James recalls. "This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had."

I'm a fan of conspiracy theories. I'm fascinated by the fact that any wild story can be engineered to sound feasible to some portion of the public. Let's call this the ordinary kind of conspiracy theory, such as the idea that a small group of rich people are secretly running the world, or that aliens are abducting people and implanting chips in their necks. These conspiracy theories are hugely unlikely by their nature.
But there's another category of conspiracy theory that is way cooler. These are the theories that are far more likely to be true than not, although no smoking gun has been found. I give you today, two conspiracy theories of my own design. I'm not saying these are true. I'm just saying they are far more likely to be true than false. We'll probably never know.